Lichtspiele

Evan Ifekoya:
She was a full body speaker standing tall in the corner of the room, “West ​End ​Angel ​O​f ​L​ove ​T​eacher ​F​or ​M​y ​I​t ​G​irl” plays in the background

Film screening

Evan Ifekoya, She was a full body speaker standing tall in the corner of the room, “West End Angel Of Love Teacher For My It Girl” plays in the background, 2017, Courtesy the artist

A meditation on bar time, club time, pastime, the loop, and the echo, this event considers the nightclub as an ontological environment.

Evan Ifekoya’s environment draws from black and queer temporalities: interpretations of disco and house music, the artist’s personal archives, as well assembling the footage of Sandi Hughes—a feminist filmmaker, DJ and poet whose videos from the 1970–90s traced Liverpool’s nightclub scenes, local community events and national political protests. Reflecting upon ideas of belonging and inheritance (ones also inflected with experiences of racism, homophobia and sexism), Ifekoya often works in the space between what has been recorded and what is taking place.

In She was…, material is sequenced, stretched and reconfigured to respond to the conditions of Bob’s Pogo Bar—a venue that affords a different set of behaviors than that of the cinema or gallery. Here, techniques of the delay, the loop, the echo are deployed to reveal decaying repetitions with a relationship to the past, portraying its former pleasures and sustained traumas.

A by-product of sound (and thus of being present), the echo is the formal repetition of content. It is a rhythm in spatial and sonorous entanglement with time. Once embodied and now disembodied, it becomes the structural relay between transmitters and receivers, speakers and listeners. Even a silence repeated is still an echo of things unspoken.

Within the form of the echo, Ifekoya’s materials appear not simply as content, but as an integration with and an exorcism of the space. She was… asks: what does it mean for an art work to ‘fit in,’ to be repeated, to be reconditioned for the purposes of leisure, entertainment, criticality; how do memories transform into aesthetic experiences; and what can that transformation tell us about memories of trauma. As the artist’s voice relates in looped voiceover, “a disco ball turns like a relic…may she rest in perfect peace, a disco ball turns like a relic…”

Evan Ifekoya’s current work investigates the possibility of an erotic and poetic occupation using film, performative writing, and sound, focused on co-authored, intimate forms of knowledge production and the radical potential of spectacle. Their ongoing project A Score, A Groove, A Phantom explores archives of blackness, sociality and inheritance as they diffract through queer nightlife and trauma in the present moment. Ifekoya is an Art Foundation Fellow in Live Art for 2017, Brighton, GB.

This is the closing event for Lichtspiele’s first season. The second season begins on October 5, 2017 with the launch of REALTY, a project by Tirdad Zolghadr, KW’s Associate Curator.